The worldwide network of computers commonly known as the "Internet" has seen explosive growth in the last several years. This growth has been typically fueled by the introduction and widespread use of "web" browsers that allow for simple graphical user interface-based access to network servers. Such network servers typically support documents formatted as "web pages." The "World Wide Web" (WWW) is a hypertext information and communication system used on the Internet with data communications operating according to a client/server model using a Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP). HTTP is a known application protocol that provides users access to files using a standard page description language referred to as Hypertext Markup Language (HTML). It should be noted that HTML is an application of Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML), an international standard (ISO 8879) for text information processing. Furthermore, the files that are accessed using HTML may be provided in different formats, such as text, graphics, images, sound, and video, among others. HTML provides basic document formatting and allows the developer to specify "links" to other servers and files. Links are then specified using a Uniform Resource Locator (URL) when an HTML-compliant client browser is used. Upon specification of a URL, a client may make a TCP/IP request to the server identified in the link and receive a "web page" in return, where the "web page" is a document formatted according to HTML.
Entering of a URL often requires the user to input long strings of characters. These may be difficult to remember and may also be prone to errors, requiring the user to find and correct the error in the long character string. One solution in the prior art to the problem of URL entry is the "bookmark." A bookmark facility in a web browser allows the user to save the URL of a current web page to a bookmark file. The user may then later access the bookmark file and return to the web page by selecting the bookmark for the web page. Bookmark lists are often presented to the user in a graphical user interface (GUI) by means of a menu list. As bookmarks are added to the list, the list can become unwieldy, requiring the user to scroll through a long bookmark list to find the desired bookmark. This may be particularly cumbersome in a multi-user environment in which several users are adding bookmarks to the list. A particular user is then required to scroll through a list of bookmarks, many of which may be unfamiliar, in order to find the bookmark for the web page that user wishes to access. Thus, it would be desirable to have in the art an alternative mechanism by which the user might avoid having to repeatedly enter a long URL string to access web pages the user frequently visits.